The SEOTuners Blog

Monthly Archives: December 2016

SEO is the bread and butter of today’s basic digital marketing setup. As per Forbes, there’s a myriad of reasons you should invest in SEO. Even if you’ve got great web design and an amazing product selection, having an incomplete SEO strategy will still probably put you below your competitors on crucial search engine keywords, which will not only hurt your traffic, but hurt your overall sales as a result.

On the other hand, while SEO’s importance is significant for businesses of all sizes on the Internet, finding a good SEO business that’s worth the cost isn’t too easy.

Why You Shouldn’t Do SEO Yourself?

If affordable website SEO services are tough to find, the natural reaction would be to simply opt to doing it yourself. But the reason partners like SeoTuners are so crucial is because SEO is only truly effective if you set up the proper infrastructure and do all the legwork – and that’s enough of a time investment to either warrant its own team, or outsourcing. And yes, SEO is worth all that hard work – it’s what search engines depend on to find you as per MOZ.

Taking on the task of doing SEO in-house is simply going to take too much of your time, especially if you’re a small business or a start-up. The best solution? Take that time and put it towards finding a good partner, and focusing on other aspects of your marketing budget.

Finding the Best SEO Solution For You

Finding a great SEO company to work with is a combination of determining a set budget, and then looking for businesses within that budget with stellar reputations and great online presence. Bonus points for a company that presents the proper credentials and showcases its previous work in the form of portfolio links and client testimonials.

Contacting clients to hear more from how a particular business conducts its customer service and takes care of troubleshooting common issues is an extra step you can take to ensure that you’re in good hands.

Finally, if you’ve begun to narrow your choices down to a definitive short list, try and communicate with each company and see which one seems easiest to work with. SEO requires cooperation and partnership, and a big part of that is making sure you can communicate easily with your SEO service.

SEO is a complex field of knowledge, with lot of intricacies and details – but there are a few concrete basics that any company should be able to impart upon, to help you decide and find out how experienced they are, and whether or not such company is fit for you.

Otherwise, as per QuickSprout, SEO can make or break your business – and define the difference between nothing and thousands of dollars a month.

Here are such questions:

How are your clients doing?

Bonus points for when asking a business for contact info for the clients. Choosing a company to work can be simplified drastically once you’ve confirmed one simple thing: The clients they have, all have successful SEO campaigns and techniques in place and are doing well versus their local competitors.

If they can’t seem to get their clients on the map, however, how can you be sure they can be effective for your business and niche?

Is paid search worth it?

SEO can typically be split between organic SEO, and paid search. As per Search Engine Land, paid search or PPC isn’t strictly about SEO; but does often relate to search engines because these are the most common places for buying ads. A good SEO company in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, LA like SeoTuner will provide you with PPC services as well as a myriad of other digital marketing options.

So, if you can work with a business that not only encourages you to step into the world of PPC, but can actively produce good results in doing so, then all the better.

What is your general SEO strategy?

There aren’t many (if any) secrets left to good SEO. There’s just good SEO. So, if a business refuses to tell you what it’ll do to boost your search engine rankings, increase your traffic and boost your sales then they aren’t trying to hide some sort of trade secret; they’re simply inexperienced and don’t want to admit it.

A good SEO company is like a good boxer. Anyone can throw a punch, and anyone can move with their two feet. But it takes years of practice and a great sense and intuition for the sport to become a good boxer – or an SEO expert.

Make sure you’re working with an SEO expert. As long as you’re armed with these three simple questions, you’re good to go.

Between the cost of SEM, web design, content, social media management and a decent logo, it can be tough to see a reason why SEO should still make it onto the list given the amount of time and effort needed to see results. After all, isn’t SEO just something large companies can afford to invest in to compete with other large companies?

No! At least, not anymore. For quite a while now, SEO has become extremely useful (and importantly) for small-to-medium businesses and enterprises because search engines deals with local business searches differently than they do for international searches.

How Local SEO Helps?

This means that if someone is looking for a business that is clearly localized – like a restaurant within a specific cuisine – then it will automatically prioritize search results of businesses located in the exact same neighborhood as from where the user is making their search, as per Search Engine Land.

This has been the way since the introduction of a new algorithm in Google. Google is the definitive leading search engine, with over 85% in total market control, and no sign of any major losses as per Statista.

SEO Doesn’t Have to be Costly

Speaking of costs, one big benefit of SEO is that it has seen a massive price reduction versus how much it used to cost businesses to employ a good SEO strategy. The result is that businesses can now afford quality SEO, mostly because companies are competing at a much more aggressive rate, bringing prices down and giving small businesses the chance to enjoy special SEO packaged built to offer an affordable yet reasonable list of services – a definite win-win situation.

You still have to find the right service, though. That’s where employing your own basic search skills can help you sift through non-viable options and narrow down your SEO solutions to the best, most affordable local services.

Pay per click advertising, also known as search engine marketing and a myriad of other terms as per Search Engine Land, is different from SEO in terms that it involves a direct daily budget to effectively increase traffic and more importantly, sales. However, unlike SEO which can be used to boost awareness and generally get more eyes on your business, PPC is meant to be used conservatively and precisely in order to target certain businesses.

This isn’t, however, how many businesses use PPC. And as such, it has a reputation for being an advertising method only made useful by the near bottomless marketing budgets of large corporations.

This simply is not true, as per Click Z. In the hands of the right and affordable Internet advertising company, a business can – with a fairly limited budget – pick off the right keywords and utilize the keyword analysis capabilities of experts like SeoTuners to easily get ahead of the competition by attracting leads and netting sales.

How to do PPC Right?

Doing PPC right is all about knowing the basic tenets of how to make the most of the marketing technique. First of all:

Use long-tail keywords. These are keywords that major industry players won’t be competing on with you, as they’re focused on spending their budget on the two or three extremely common keywords that everyone keys into their search engines.

Instead, focus on something more specific. Instead of “wedding photography”, try something like “affordable wedding video package los angeles”. Los Angeles and Ventura helps you specify what search engines already look for when cataloging a search request (location), and choosing a specific product or package with a commonly searched adjective which lets you shy away from the keywords with too much ad competition.

Finally, what really matters with PPC is that you are specific. You need to match your keyword to your landing page. Pay per click works on the basis that you pay for a certain number of clicks.

On their own, however, those clicks are entirely meaningless to you. The whole point is making sure that they actually pay forward into something useful – a sale. And that’s where a quality landing page comes into play to capture readers and leads and get them to buy the product they were looking for all along.

We’re living in the digital age, so it’s clear that digital advertising is integral to any company operating nowadays. Even for local restaurateurs and hardware store owners, leveraging the internet to boost sales and curb the competition is becoming increasingly important.

And for aspiring startups and existing corporations alike, the Internet’s seamless global communication possibilities makes it too powerful and useful to resist.

Alas, while digital marketing is anything but straightforward, there are a few must-have techniques that apply to almost any business, and can really take your online business to the next level.

Create a Laser-Focused Strategy

Let’s start with the most important bit – while the Internet allows you to speak, communicate and market to anyone on the Internet, amounting to a total of over 3 billion people as per Time, the fact remains that only a tiny fraction of that massive audience is interested in buying anything from you, and even less actually will.

A big part of digital marketing is making sure you don’t waste time and money speaking to an audience that isn’t interested in your message. Let’s repeat one of the most important rules and lessons in sales: you can’t sell someone something they don’t want.

Try Video Marketing

Text and audio are popular mediums in the Internet, but nothing gets as many eyeballs, achieves as much conversion and is as SEO-intensive as high quality video marketing, as per The Huffington Post. And with a little talent, it’s not that expensive either.

That being said, it’s a double-edged sword. Don’t get into video marketing unless you’re in contact with a quality, affordable website advertising company that has extensive video marketing experience.

Are You Mobile Yet?

Mobile marketing is growing more and more important. As per Statista, over 2 billion people use smartphones today – and many of them are using those phones to browse products, and make purchase decisions. Keeping your web presence dynamic and mobile-compliant is key to capturing that gigantic portion of your audience.

Work with SEO Specialists

It’s not enough to just install a few plugins, avoid spamming your customers and have a general gist of an idea of what modern SEO looks like. SEO is an integral part of any company’s digital marketing plan, and having professionals at the helm when it comes to building a proper SEO system for your business is critical.

If you want success for your business online, you need to be the best locally and in your industry. To be the best, you have to provide quality information, an amazing product or service, and be seen before your competitors. To be seen before your competitors, you need good SEO, provided through an affordable website advertising company like SeoTuners.

Once you’ve implemented these techniques, prepare to see your numbers rise dramatically. Digital advertising and marketing might seem like a field with a lot of gimmicks, but really, these are just straightforward trend-based tips on the basics – and it’s a strong foundation in the basics that guarantees a great online presence.

SEO is growing increasingly complex, and resource-intensive. Search Engine Land estimates that companies will spend $65 billion on the industry this year, and that value is supposed to increase on an annual basis.

Cheap and fast black hat techniques are quickly dying out and are being actively punished by Google and other search engines, while arduous, leg work-based white hat techniques are being made more effective.

However, even mostly without the help of an affordable website SEO company, there are a few techniques you can apply right away – and you’ll within short order, see their beneficial effects.

Apply Smarter Linkbuilding

Right off the bat, you can start your journey to highly effective SEO by making use of quality backlinks. Backlinks still matter in this day and age, but they’re nigh useless if the reputation of the website that is linking to you isn’t absolutely stellar.

Indeed, what matters today far more than the number of backlinks you have is where they’re from. Even just a handful of quality backlinks from educational or authority sites can make a huge difference in your SERP, and subsequently, your ranking.

How do you get quality backlinks? By offering to replace broken links with your own content, as per Backlinko. Authority sites and educational blogs often require several outbound links for SEO purposes and to redirect readers to sources for the various facts and information cited in a post – but over time, websites change their domain structure, companies rebrand, or links simply die. That’s when it’s time to contact blogs and offer your own research or content as a replacement to dead links.

Get a Website Audit

This will require the service of an SEO specialist, but it is well worth it. One of the biggest problems with many companies is that they simply don’t know how well they’re doing in the grand scheme of things. Don’t let your company be part of that problem – use a quality SEO service to determine first where you should focus your attention, and optimize accordingly.

Put Your Contact Info on Every Page

Search engines function in relatively new ways today, specifically in the world of local SEO. You can get a lot done with just a few simple tweaks. One of them is to input your company’s contact information on every single page, rather than just your contact page, as per Search Engine Land – that way, Google is more likely to score your website higher for having a physical location with consistent, frequently-posted contact information.

That being said, it’s also important to do so in a way that is not obnoxious. A simple fix is to place your contact information on every one of your webpage’s headers – or, more accurately, your website header. That way it’s always easily accessible, consistent in its location, and it blends in perfectly into that outer layer of a page that exists, can be viewed, but is rarely looked at unless explicitly needed.

With these three simple SEO tips and the services of an affordable website SEO company like SeoTuners, you’ll quickly get a leg up on the competition, and that without investing majorly in SEO. You can even apply most of these tips and techniques on your own, although getting a professional specialist to do it for you ensures a thorough, quick job.

When it comes to SEO, it’s important to note how critical a strong focus on the home turf is. In fact, that importance has been rowing a lot as per Entrepreneur. Businesses are largely dependent on their reputation and popularity locally when it comes to success – and unless the majority of your client or customer base is outside of Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, you need a laser-targeted SEO approach, and a proper SEO services company in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks.

This isn’t just because of the fact that your customers are here – there are a myriad of reasons to focusing on local marketing, and many of them are very important in SEO.

Home is Where the Cash Is

If you’re a retailer, restaurant, or general service provider, then obviously your biggest potential for growth will be at home. In today’s industry, it’s better to be the big fish in the little pond here at Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, than try and compete with the blue whales out in the Pacific – through the right marketing and business approach, you can continue to grow and dominate your industry at home, rather than spreading thin by expanding too soon and losing out on precious logistics possibilities, product quality, and a number of other things.

In short – in most cases, it’s more profitable for you to continue to grow your business here in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, and focus on perfecting the core identity of your brand, rather than moving too fast as per Read Write. Grow slow, but grow strong – through that small-scale mindset, you can build a personal and talented team of professionals and see a much brighter, less frustrating future ahead.

The first step is to see where you and the competition stand, in order to have a clear picture of how best to outrank the competition and dominate local industry.

Local Keyword Analysis

Long tail keywords are a part of the bread and butter of the SEO industry, as per Search Engine Watch. Most importantly, knowing what keywords to use can help you laser-focus your marketing efforts, and capture the audience that is most likely to both read your content, and pay for your products or services. Keywords need to be relevant, and provide context – the days of low-quality black hat keyword research are gone.

Local Demographic Research

Once your SEO partner has figured out what most people tend to look for in your area and industry, it’s time to see exactly who is reading your content, and buying your products. It’s important to keep your writing relevant to the clientele – if you sell pain medication and see an equal interest in pain meds among athletes and aging seniors, but the majority of your audience is concerned with aging rather than overtraining, it would make little sense to write content about recovering from sports injuries.

With the proper research and analysis, the final and most important step is the actualization of the SEO plan. Finally, that’s where the quality of your chosen partner will shine the most – as long as you work with a reputable and experienced company, you’ll have no worries.

SEO, when applied properly, sort of follows the basic philosophy of “go hard or go home” – if your end goal is to outrank the competition, maximize visibility and rake in as much traffic as possible, then you can’t simply dabble in search engine optimization. Yes, SEO is legwork intensive – but that doesn’t mean you have to put in all the work on your own.

An SEO service will take the legwork and guesswork out of the optimization, and leave you with an end result that puts you miles ahead of the competition – if you choose wisely and partner up with a quality SEO company in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, that is.

Why Quality SEO Matters

It’s not even just a matter of getting the most out of SEO’s usefulness – as the Internet continues to grow and search engines become increasingly strict with their guidelines for what a quality website should look like, businesses need to stop looking at ways to solely expand their web presence aggressively, and start looking for ways to effectively trim and tighten their existing offerings, and create a web presence that describes a focus on quality and excellence.

SEO is more than just a little bag of tips and tricks – it entails a wide selection of Best Practices, used as vague guidelines to let professional services and specialists analyze and present you with a better version of your website and social presence. That means better content, better writing, better design – everything needed to prove to your customer base that your domain is the go-to for services, products, and information within your industry and area. And it’s massive – Search Engine Land estimates that the industry is worth $65 billion, and is steadily growing.

Getting all that done isn’t easy. Sure, SEO matters, but quality SEO matters much, much more. Which is why you’ll have to curate and vet your potential partners.

Finding the Right SEO Partner

SEO companies seem to be a dime a dozen nowadays, and that can make finding the one to work with quite difficult. But just like SeoTuners, a quality SEO company in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks will always reveal itself by one defining feature: a stellar reputation and track record.

Via the power of instant mass communication, the Internet has quickly unveiled itself as the most powerful amplifier to the word of mouth, ever. Businesses and customers have never had to think and worry about trust and reputation as much as they do today – to the point that some experts point to the creation and evolution of a “thank you economy”, an economy where customer service and actual legitimate business-to-customer empathy will become integral to success, as per Convince and Convert.

The right SEO company will share that philosophy, putting you and the quality of your website ahead of fast and easy profit.

In Conclusion

SEO is time-consuming, complex, and a service that is constantly evolving, with new techniques being developed on a weekly basis, and new news changing the landscape of the industry regularly as per Moz. As such, focusing on SEO through your in-house resources could get expensive, and may get you nowhere.

A good SEO service, on the other hand, will deal with the legwork and let you worry about properly focusing on your business operations.